“Next” week, as of June 18, being, obviously, this week.
Except—don’t count on it. Exactly a week earlier, on June 11, Jay Sekulow was on ABC and said the same thing. “That’s a decision that the president will make in consultation with his chief lawyer, Marc Kasowitz,” said Sekulow, adding that Trump would “address it next week.”
“Next” week, as of June 11, now being, obviously, last week.
Suggesting that next week, as of June 18, probably means “Next week I’ll just say ‘next week’ again.”
Thus is the Trump Gang continuing to kick the can down the road on the issue of just confirming or denying that there are tapes. As I have noted here previously, Trump has put himself in an impossible position. Sooner or later, at an impeachment or in a courtroom, Trump will need those tapes, will need them to validate his version and not Comey’s. If he can’t produce them, he will either be asking us to believe he would not release something that would exonerate him, or he will have to confess that his tweet of May 12 was an empty threat, or, worst of all, he will have to prove that there aren’t tapes, never were tapes, and he didn’t destroy them, and frankly, I don’t know how you ever prove that vast a negative. To give you a time frame on this, the House Intelligence Committee had given Trump a deadline of Friday, June 23, to voluntarily produce any tapes.
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There are two known potential outside sources for Trump tapes, or at least information about Trump tapes. The Secret Service says it does not have any—this was in reply to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Wall Street Journal. Then there is the long-standing assumption that for security reasons, all phone calls to the White House, no matter who the president is, are automatically recorded, in case somebody makes a threat. Is that true? Is it also done for outgoing calls? If there are recordings, are they kept? Is there a tape of the March 30 call in which Comey claims Trump talked about the “cloud” he was under and pushed him to publicly clear him about Russia? Is there a tape of the April 11 call in which Comey claims Trump wanted to know what Comey had done about publicly clearing him? Depending on the language used, tapes of either of those phone calls could be submitted as evidence of Trump trying to obstruct the FBI investigation and thus obstruct justice, or even of Trump threatening Comey, or of trying to induce him to lie.
We only know that the Secret Service says it doesn’t have any recordings. We only know that two weeks ago, Trump said we’d soon find out and be disappointed by the answer. We only know that this goober Sekulow has now gone on talk shows on consecutive Sundays and predicted resolution next week, leading me to wonder if Sekulow is not, in fact, an actual person but is himself simply a recording.
There is another way to clear this up, at least in part, and I hardly think I’m the first person to realize this. The big issue of recordings and the little one of who does or doesn’t have them—White House operations, Secret Service, Trump himself—can be ascertained, by the Justice Department’s special counsel, using a little technical device known inside the world of audio—and inside other worlds—as a “subpoena.”
Finally, there is one other possibility that, to my surprise, I haven’t seen raised anywhere else. In the District of Columbia, it is legal to record conversations in person or on the phone so long as one of the people in the conversation knows it is being recorded. Down the block from Ford’s Theatre, just before you get to that Chop’t salad place, at its office, doesn’t the FBI record all the phone calls that come into its headquarters?
I mean, never mind Trump-Comey tapes. Are there—could there be, legally can there be—FBI-Comey tapes?
FIRING THE SPECIAL COUNSEL
Post date • FRIDAY, JUNE 23
It ultimately does not matter whether the president does, doesn’t, has, or hasn’t fired the special counsel who is investigating him. Obviously this is a simplified overview. The grinding wheels of justice and truth would be better served with Robert Mueller on the job, rather than with his being just the latest body on the pile of men Trump has fired as they gathered the damning facts about him. But in a larger sense, firing Mueller might actually speed Trump’s demise. Because, whatever breathing room Trump might gain from cashiering Mueller and declaring the investigation over and himself vindicated, it would be more than counterbalanced by the degree to which the headline “Trump Fires Another Investigator” will move the story of his alleged corruption, obstruction, and madness into the center of the American view.
It is hard for you and me to really grasp this. We have fought this man, and fought what he meant, and saw clearly what he would do for more than one year (some of us, exactly two years). But we are not average Americans, and I’m not talking about our political viewpoints. I’m talking about our political viewership. I have never seen a study of just how much time the average American spends thinking about politics each day, but I would suspect it’s a lot shorter than it takes to read the shortest of these commentaries. For better or for worse, to the average American, even the average American voter, it just isn’t necessarily a priority.
A president fires the U.S. attorney in New York investigating his associate’s business dealings? How many million Americans didn’t know this happened? A president then fires the FBI director investigating his campaign? How many million Americans don’t know that happened? Far fewer. A president then tweets that he’s being investigated for firing the FBI director, then fires the special counsel doing that investigating? How many million Americans won’t know this has happened? Far fewer still.
There is a tipping point in everything in American culture, from reality-TV popularity to political scandal. It is almost always: a lot of people who didn’t know about something suddenly finding out about that something.
You can’t really establish a single tipping point in the Watergate scandal, but the “Saturday Night Massacre” is probably the closest thing. On a Friday, Richard Nixon said he would refuse a court order to surrender his White House tapes, and he ordered the special prosecutor to drop the Watergate case. On Saturday afternoon, in a news conference carried live on television, that prosecutor said he would continue the investigation anyway, and continue to challenge the president in court. Later that day, the president ordered the attorney general to fire the special prosecutor for defying him. The attorney general refused and resigned. The deputy attorney general refused and either resigned or was fired; it still isn’t 100 percent clear. Saturday night, the third-ranking figure in the Justice Department, the solicitor general, finally fired the prosecutor.
And all hell then broke loose.
On the Friday before the Saturday Night Massacre, there had been ten different stories on the front page of The New York Times, from the Yom Kippur War to a shootout in midtown Manhattan to Game 5 of the 1973 World Series. Nothing about Watergate. By the Sunday after the Saturday Night Massacre, there was an eight-column, three-line headline about Watergate and four separate front-page stories, including one just about impeachment.
By the Monday after the Saturday Night Massacre, White House and congressional and senate offices were flooded with telegrams. The Watergate scandal—front of mind for millions of Americans but, in its sixteenth month, still an irrelevant shape on the horizon to most of us—suddenly became the only topic in politics, and just as quickly politics became the only topic in America.
Would “Trump Fires Mueller” unfold precisely that way? It’s impossible to tell. The world of media is utterly changed. We have a thousand more distractions now than we did when Richard Nixon had Archibald Cox fired in 1973. We have another president who will lie about anything, but, unlike Nixon, the one we have now can do so instantaneously via social media, and his true believers will happily reject the insights of Rosenstein and Mueller to instead swear by those of Diamond and Silk.
But to fire Mueller is to tempt a repetition of the Saturday Night Massacre—and the spread of public awareness of the investig
ation—which might not destroy Trump but cannot possibly help him. And just as important is to risk a repetition of the aftermath of the massacre—the part very few people noticed or talked about, then or now.
Within twelve days after Nixon fired the special prosecutor, the pressure and the outcry had grown so loud that Nixon had to hire another special prosecutor—the one who would ultimately help force him from office.
THE APPEASEMENT OF TRUMP
Post date • TUESDAY, JUNE 27, 2017
The president of the United States has admitted that the Russians “meddled” in the election that put him in power, and he has blamed his predecessor in essence for not stopping him, and he has admitted to intimidating the FBI director who was investigating this treachery, and he has resumed his veiled threats of intimidation against the special counsel now investigating his treachery—and yet this “president” has not yet been removed and arrested.
We are appeasing Trump.
The mind reels, and our democracy if not dead is in suspended animation because the Republican Party is now actively shielding this traitorous megalomaniac because he will sign whatever they put in front of him, and their actions should be identified for what they are: being accessories after the fact to the worst set of crimes in American history.
We are appeasing Trump.
The nation, which should be in the streets, holding a general strike, fighting to restore the rule of law that is dissolving in front of its eyes, is instead utterly divided or distracted or both. Republican legislators wholly owned by corporations are dismantling the already porous health care net in order to fund tax breaks for the wealthiest and greediest bastards among us, even though every group from those legislators’ own constituents to every hospital and insurance organization opposes the action. The president’s sycophantic base is happy because though a few of them may have noticed that society is still hitting them in the head, they look with perverse joy at the reality that this society is hitting women and minorities harder.
We are appeasing Trump.
The elected Democrats, who should be the voice of resistance against every legislative rape by Trump and his gang as well as the base for all the defenses of the democracy, are instead jockeying for position and cynically calculating whether keeping Trump in office next year will give them a better chance of election—cynically calculating whether it’s better to let the country burn until autumn 2018 rather than to put out the fire now. These Democrats are offset by others who argue one vote in one special election means they need to ease up on the “Russia thing” and must “stand for something,” as if the “Russia thing” didn’t threaten everything we hold dear and standing for a restoration of representative government weren’t “something.”
We are appeasing Trump.
And the media are obsessed not with the lies of a president who is gifted only at lying, and news conferences of his lying spokespeople that contain no news, no truth, no reality, and no morality, spun by cretinous deceivers who make the farcical propaganda of the infamous Iraqi Baghdad Bob look like the revealed word; the media are obsessed not with recognizing that war has been declared on them and that Trump’s goons are playing them like the proverbial two-dollar banjo—the media are obsessed that the White House won’t let them record the press briefings that are nothing but lies, and instead of getting up and walking out and no longer participating in this desecration of freedom of the press, they stay there and still report the lies and still put the White House liars on the Sunday shows and still pander to the Trump audiences that were not watching them, are not watching them, and will not be watching them, and calculate only how the lack of a live feed from the White House press room will impact their ratings instead of how the lack of truth from the White House press room will impact whether their children live in freedom or slavery.
We are appeasing Trump.
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Resist—because these people are not going to do it for you.
Peace.
Epilogue
Well, thank goodness we all know how this whole thing turned out.
To try to button this up in midsummer was to be forced to place a wager on the outcome even while the percentage of those firmly believing in this would-be Emperor and his New Clothes was still so high that the amount of time left in the Revenge Porn of Administrations could range from about four years to about four minutes.
But as I put down my abused and overworked laptop, it was beginning to seem clear that there were four inevitable outcomes for Trump. Each would be terminal to his presidency. It was plausible that he could elude the consequences of one, two, or maybe even three of them. Yet barring the most unforeseen and calamitous of national crises—like Trump stumbling into war with North Korea because he shot off his big bazoo and said something like “Fire and Fury,” which his puppeteer Steve Bannon had remembered from his days monetizing the video game World of Warcraft—Trump was not going to escape. Nobody has that much dumb luck, and Trump clearly went way over his limit long before he took office.
The first inevitable and inescapable trap was his deteriorating control of his personality/mental health/impulsiveness/brain trauma/whatever. The domestic terrorism in Charlottesville not only revealed his decades-long leanings toward racism, anti-Semitism, and worse, but reflected his prioritizing of his own refusal to be “controlled” over everything else—to say nothing of his mindless rage. In mid-July, he had taken three mutually exclusive positions on the second failure of the health care Repeal and Replace legislation in just forty-eight hours. His hazy, dreamlike grip on reality was sliding from loose to intermittent to only periodic. And maybe worst of all: He was beginning to repeat himself. When he hopped into the cab of a big fire truck rolled out for Made in America Week and pretended to drive it, America remembered he had done exactly the same thing, in almost exactly the same suit, photographed at almost exactly the same angle, in another big rig, back in March. The unstated question was, did he remember?
Trump’s second bottomless pit was Obstruction of Justice. Apart from the repeated pleas/requests/threats to have everybody in authority except Putin publicly clear him about Russia, and apart from the attempt to get Mike Flynn a legal pass, and apart from whatever he actually did to Jim Comey, and apart from whatever Bob Mueller was collating, there was the small matter of that little June 2016 meeting attended by Trump Junior, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. The surface details were bad enough: their own emails said they believed they would be hosting middlemen delivering dirt on Clinton from the Russian government. Trump himself boasted about new “corrupt dealings” by Hillary three hours after Donnie Junior had confirmed the confab, and he adopted a new number for her total of emails in a tweet ten minutes after the meeting ended. Worse yet, the initial Trump Junior denial about how they only talked about adoption was reportedly composed by Trump himself aboard Air Force One. They unnecessarily dragged the cover-up of that meeting (and thus the entire Trump-Russia thing) from the comparably arm’s-length distance of Trump Tower directly into the Oval Office.
The third patch of quicksand was, obviously enough, at the end of the route marked Russia. We might never know exactly how much Putin did to mess with the 2016 election, and we might never know exactly how much Trump and his gang knew in advance and conspired with the Russians. But that Trump Tower meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya, Rinat Akhmetshin, Ike Kaveladze, and everybody but Boris and Natasha meant that the Trumps had tried to conspire with the Russians—and just because maybe you don’t completely betray your country doesn’t mean you don’t get charged for trying to do that. The Trumps seemed to have forgotten that there is a crime known as attempted murder.
And the last and maybe the most perilous long walk off Trump’s marina full of short piers was the indication of cracks in his political base. His approval numbers in the Rust Belt counties he had so unexpectedly flipped had dropped underwater. Nothing less than a Fox poll show
ed disapproval edging approval in his handling of the economy and even Iran and Syria, and getting blown out of the tub on immigration, health care, and Russia. The same mid-July numbers suggested that although 41 percent considered Junior’s clambake with the Russkies was “no big deal,” 55 percent found it “troubling.” Part of the base was seemingly looking for a climb-down, an amazing development considering that it required them to acknowledge—if only to themselves—that they were wrong about him, that he was elected nefariously, that they couldn’t continue to enjoy their revenge against liberals, and that there was no middle ground and if they left Trump’s side they could never go back. Were they to become genuinely remorseful and make noises about punishing the Republicans in the midterms, their congresspeople wouldn’t be doing any climbing down. They’d simply jump.
Oddly, the thing that seemed to be sustaining Trump was the media’s continuing refusal to acknowledge that what the rest of us were all seeing—and what they were pretending wasn’t happening—was something that was outside their collective experience. I spent twenty years in sports news and then twenty years mostly in political news, and it never ceased to amaze me that sports reporters were constantly expecting and even hoping to cover things that had never happened before, while their political counterparts seemed to have been constructed from the conviction that nothing that hadn’t happened before in American history could possibly happen now. There couldn’t be a candidate who sold his soul to another country to get elected, because they had never covered one before. There couldn’t be a semi-functioning disturbed psyche occupying the White House, because they had never run into one in the Senate or House or whatever county board they broke in covering. And they certainly couldn’t write any of these things. Bill Safire, Tom Wicker, Christopher Hitchens, and Merriman Smith never wrote these things. So onward they marched, surprised by every rake they stepped on, awaking each morn fully convinced things would get back to normal and they could simply rework something they had written in 1999, unwilling to invoke the words “treason” or “madness” because they weren’t legal or psychological experts—as if you needed to be an electrical engineer to write about how the wiring had just caught fire.
Trump Is F*cking Crazy (This Is Not a Joke) Page 45